Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Embodiments relate to databases, and in particular, to a mechanism of protecting the content for Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) scripts.
ETL is the process by which data from one or more sources, is made available in a database having a specific structure. In the (E)xtract phase, data is provided from the data source. In the (T)ransform phase, that data from the source is converted into a format suitable for storage in the database. In the (L)oad phase, the converted data is placed in appropriate locations within the database.
In some cases, the computer language that is utilized to perform ETL processes, may be visible and available to the user. For example, the Active Template Library (ATL) is a data services scripting language to execute ETL jobs for databases available from SAP SE, of Walldorf, Germany.
Because the script of ATL is in the form of text, it is easy to copy. This potentially renders ETL jobs and their constituent data, visible to outsiders. Such a situation poses a security risk and the potential loss of economic value by allowing unauthorized entities to copy those ETL scripts.